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ADDRESS 

OF THE 



PRESIDENT OF THE 
UNITED STATES 



AT THE 



ASSOCIATED PRESS LUNCHEON 



NEW YORK, N. Y. 
APRIL 20, 1915 




■ 



WASHINGTON 
1915 




im 7 1915 



.^ 



\9^ 



\9 



ADDRESS. 

Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Associated Press, Ladies, and 
Gentlemen: I am deeply gratified by the generous reception you 
have accorded me. It makes me look back with a touch of regret to 
former occasions when I have stood in this place and enjoyed a 
greater liberty than is granted me to-day. There have been times 
when I stood in this spot and said what I really thought, and I can 
not help praying that those days of indulgence may be accorded me 
again. I have come here to-day, of course, somewhat restrained by a 
sense of responsibility which I can not escape. For I take the Asso- 
ciated Press very seriously. I know the enormous part that you play 
in the affairs not only of this country but of the world. You deal 
in the raw material of opinion and, if my convictions have any 
validity, opinion ultimately governs the world. 

It is, therefore, of very serious things that I think as I face this 
body of men. I do not think of you, however, as members of the 
Associated Press. I do not think of you as men of different parties 
or of different racial derivations or of different religious denomina- 
tions. I want to talk to you as to my fellow citizens of the United 
States, for there are serious things which as fellow citizens we ought 
to consider. The times behind us, gentlemen, have been difficult 
enough ; the times before us are likely to be more difficult still, be- 
cause, whatever may be said about the present condition of the 
world's affairs, it is clear that they are drawing rapidly to a climax, 
and at the climax the test will come, not only for the nations engaged 
in the present colossal struggle — it will come to them, of course — but 
the test will come for us particularly. 

Do you realize that, roughly speaking, we are the only great Nation 
at present disengaged ? I am not speaking, of course, with disparage- 
ment of the greatness of those nations in Europe which are not par- 
ties to the present war, but I am thinking of their close neighborhood 
to it. I am thinking how their lives much more than ours touch the 
very heart and stuff of the business, whereas we have rolling between 
us and those bitter days across the water 3,000 miles of cool and silent 
ocean. Our atmosphere is not yet charged with those disturbing 
elements which must permeate every nation of Europe. Therefore, 
is it not likely that the nations of the world will some day turn to us 

(3) 

91360—13 



for the cooler assessment of the elements engaged? I am not now 
thinking so preposterous a thought as that we should sit in judgment 
upon them — ^no nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other 
nation — ^but that we shall some day have to assist in reconstructing 
the processes of peace. Our resources are untouched; we are more 
and more becoming by the force of circumstances the mediating 
Nation of the world in respect of its finance. We must make up our 
minds what are the best things to do and what are the best ways to 
do them. We must put our money, our energy, our enthusiasm, our 
sympathy into these things, and we must have our judgments pre- 
pared and our spirits chastened against the coming of that day. 

So that I am not speaking in a selfish spirit when I say that our 
whole duty, for the present at any rate, is summed up in this motto, 
"America first." Let us think of America before we think of Europe, 
in order that America may be fit to be Europe's friend when the day 
of tested friendship comes. The test of friendship is not now sym- 
pathy with the one side or the other, but, getting ready to help both 
sides when the struggle is over. The basis of neutrality, gentlemen, 
is not indifference ; it is not self-interest. The basis of neutrality is 
sympathy for mankind. It is fairness, it is good will, at bottom. It 
is impartiality of spirit and of judgment. I wish that all of our 
fellow citizens could realize that. There is in some quarters a dis- 
position to create distempers in this body politic. Men are even 
uttering slanders against the United States, as if to excite her. Men 
are saying that if we should go to war upon either side there would 
be a divided America — an abominable libel of ignorance ! America 
is not all of it vocal just now. It is vocal in spots, but I, for one, 
have a complete and abiding faith in that great silent body of Ameri- 
cans who are not standing up and shouting and expressing their 
opinions just now, but are waiting to find out and support the duty 
of America. I am just as sure of their solidity and of their loyalty 
and of their unanimity, if we act justly, as I am that the history of 
this country has at every crisis and turning point illustrated this 
great lesson. 

We are the mediating Nation of the world. I do not mean that we 
undertake not to mind our own business and to mediate where other 
people are quarreling. I mean the word in a broader sense. We are 
compounded of the nations of the world ; we mediate their blood, we 
mediate their traditions, we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, 
their passions; we are ourselves compounded of those things. We 
are, therefore, able to understand all nations ; we are able to understand 
them in the compound, not separately, as partisans, but unitedly as 
knowing and comprehending and embodying them all. It is in that 
sense that I mean that America is a mediating Nation, The opinion 



of America, the action of America, is- ready to turn, and free to tm^n, 
in any direction. Did you ever rejflect upon liow almost every other 
nation has through long centuries been headed in one direction? 
That is not true of the United States. The United States has no 
racial momentum. It has no history back of it which makes it run 
all its energies and all its ambitions in one particular direction. And 
America is particularly free in this, that she has no hampering ambi- 
tions as a world power. We do not want a foot of anybody's territory. 
If we have been obliged by circumstances, or have considered ourselves 
to be obliged by circumstances, in the past, to take territory which we 
otherwise would not have thought of taking, I believe I am right in 
saying that we have considered it our duty to administer that terri- 
tory, not for ourselves but for the people living in it, and to i^ut this 
burden upon our consciences — not to think that this thing is ours for 
our use, but to regard ourselves as trustees of the great business for 
those to whom it does really belong, trustees ready to hand it over to 
the cestui que trust at any time when the business seems to make that 
possible and feasible. That is what I mean by saying we have no 
hampering, ambitions. We do not want anything that does not 
belong to us. Is not a nation in that position free to serve other 
nations, and is not a nation like that ready to form some part of the 
assessing opinion of the world? 

My interest in the neutrality of the United States is not the petty 
desire to keep out of trouble. To judge by my experience, I have 
never been able to keep out of trouble. I have never looked for it, 
but I have always found it. I do not want to walk around trouble. 
If any man wants a scrap that is an interesting scrap and worth 
while, I am his man. I warn him that he is not going to draw me into 
the scrap for his advertisement, but if he is looking for trouble that 
is the troiible of men in general and I can help a little, why, then, I 
am in for it. But I am interested in neutrality because there is some- 
thing so much greater to do than fight ; there is a distinction waiting 
for this Nation that no nation has ever yet got. That is the distinc- 
tion of absolute self-control and self-mastery. Whom do joii admire 
most among your friends? The irritable man? The man out of 
whom you can get a " rise " without trying ? The man who will fight 
at the drop of the hat, whether he knows what the hat is dropped for 
or not ? Don't you admire and don't you fear, if you have to contest 
with him, the self -mastered man who watches you with calm eje and 
comes in only when you have carried the thing so far that you must 
be disposed of ? That is the man joii respect. That is the man who, 
you know, has at bottom a much more fundamental and terrible 
courage than the irritable, fighting man. Now, I covet for America 
this splendid courage of reserve moral force, and I wanted to point 
out to you gentlemen simply this : 



6 

There is news and news. There is what is called news from Turtle 
Bay that turns out to be falsehood, at any rate in what it is said 
to signify, but which, if you could get the Nation to believe it true, 
might disturb our equilibrium and our self-possession. We ought 
not to deal in stuff of that kind. We ought not to permit that sort of 
thing to use up the electrical energy of the wires, because its energy 
is malign, its energy is not of the truth, its energy is of mischief. 
It is possible to sift truth. I have known some things to go out on the 
wires as true when there was only one man or one group of men who 
could have told the originators of that report whether it was true or 
not, and they were not asked whether it was true or not for fear it might 
not be true. That sort of report ought not to go out over the wires. 
There is generally, if not always, somebody who knows whether the 
thing is so or not, and in these days, above all over days, we ought 
to take particular pains to resort to the one small group of men, or to 
the one man if there be but one, who knows whether those things are 
true or not. The world ought to know the truth ; the world ought not 
at this period of unstable equilibrium to be disturbed by rumor, 
ought not to be disturbed by imaginative combinations of circum- 
stances, or, rather, by circumstances stated in combination which do 
not belong in combination. You gentlemen, and gentlemen engaged 
like you, are holding the balances in your hand. This unstable 
equilibrium rests upon scales that are in your hands. For the food 
of opinion, as I began by saying, is the news of the day. I have 
known many a man to go off at a tangent on information that was 
not reliable. Indeed, that describes the majority of men. The world 
is held stable by the man who waits for the next day to find out 
whether the report was true or not. 

We can not afford, therefore, to let the rumors of irresponsible 
persons and origins get into the atmosphere of the United States. 
We are trustees for what I venture to say is the greatest heritage 
that any nation ever had, the love of justice and righteousness and 
human liberty. For, fundamentally, those are the things to which 
America is addicted and to which she is devoted. There are groups 
of selfish men in the United States, there are coteries, where sinister 
things are purposed, but the great heart of the American people is 
just as sound and true as it ever was. And it is a single heart; it is 
the heart of America. It is not a heart made up of sections selected 
out of other countries. 

What I try to remind myself of every day when I am almost over- 
come by perplexities, what I try to remember, is what the people at 
home are thinking about. I try to put myself in the place of the man 
who does not know all the things that I know and ask myself what 
he would like the policy of this country to be. Not the talkative man, 



not the partisan man, not the man who remembers first that he is a 
Republican or a Democrat, or that his parents were German or 
English, but the man who remembers first *that the whole destiny 
of modern affairs centers largely upon his being an American first of 
all. If I permitted myself to be a partisan in this present struggle, I 
would be unworthy to represent you. If I permitted myself to forget 
the people who are not partisans, I would be unworthy to be your 
spokesman. I am not sure that I am worthy to represent you, but I 
do claim this degree of worthiness — that before everything else I 
love America. 

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